NY Times To Charge For Online Content 488
Hugh Pickens writes "New York Magazine reports that the NY Times appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system. The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight."
Good Bye, New York Times (Score:4, Insightful)
You were significantly less full of crap than other newspapers. We will miss you. :'-(
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then. I will read www.bbc.co.uk or www.telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk or www.zeit.de or cnn.com or slashdot.org or www.dailymail.co.uk or and the list goes on.
This is the whole problem, of course - the more sites go paywalled, the more incentive there is for the others to stay free. Very few media sources I've found actually provide a significantly better service than many other sources, so it simply doesn't make sense for me as a consumer to pay for product I can get for free. Of course, there are those that say that my way of thinking will kill journalism / music / whatever, but I'll pay as soon as there is significant incentive to (ie. if they actually start dying off).
NY Times can do it, can your paper do it? (Score:3, Insightful)
The New York Times can make an effective paywall because they hold the rights to columnists that share opinions that are nationally relevant. Local NY city news is covered by other papers, so they need exclusive content like the book reviews and bestseller lists.
WSJ has business opinions. Nobody's going to pay for press releases restated, or the S&P 500 values... but reviews and opinions are still worth something.
Can your local paper do that when your local TV station has a newsroom covering the same topics and also posting to the web for free? Nope. I don't really care what's going on in local high school sports, and that's about that's exclusive to my local paper.
Newspapers Place in Our Society (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not a big fan of paying for any online subscription, and to contradict myself I am not sure I would for this (I pay for a regular Boston Globe as my own attempt to try and keep the journalist machine going), but somehow, I still wish for them to be successful. Like their own struggles, I have no idea what the obvious answer is. If you value similar, I am not saying pay for the NYT, but I recommend finding something you are willing to put a few dollars into every month, even if its just your local Sunday paper.
RIP, New York Times (Score:3, Insightful)
What are they doing to cut costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly don't know what they are doing to cut costs - but if they believe they are becoming a "global newspaper of record" - then maybe they ought to cut ties with New York. I'm sure doing business in NYC ain't cheap - do they really need an entire building in midtown Manhattan? I could see an office - something like what they presumably have in DC - as a place for reporters who are literally on the local beat to do officey type things. But I'm willing to bet that the business of running the paper could be done just as well from the booneys as in the middle of the big apple for a whole lot less. Sure. you'd lose some die-hard manhattanite employees, but nobody's irreplaceable - especially when the world is changing as fast as the publishing world is...
Re:Good Bye, New York Times (Score:5, Insightful)
Kevin Mitnick begs to differ.
I'll probably sign up for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Redux (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't they try that before.
They built it and nobody came.
I didn't bother reading it until it was free.
Reading for a fee, I'll skip it again.
There is more than enough free content and they aren't producing enough interesting content.
Re:RIP, New York Times (Score:2, Insightful)
These days, I get all my news from either FARK [fark.com], Slashdot [slashdot.org], The Daily Show with Jon Stewart [thedailyshow.com], or The Colbert Report [colbertnation.com]
I hesitate to suggest that that's not the most balanced reading/viewing list...
Good luck with that (Score:1, Insightful)
Good luck with that. It works for the WSJ because the WSJ reports actual news; investors will not tolerate op-ed rants being passed off as news because it would make the WSJ worthless for financial analysts. The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases - such lack of objectivity is not something you are likely to succeed in selling online to people in business. People at home will just tune to CNN and FauxNews for their daily dose of op-eds rather than sit in front of a browser to pay for their spoon-fed propoganda.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Insightful)
I find that foreign outlets -- particularly the BBC -- will report on U.S. political news faster that U.S. outlets do (if at all).
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't read dailymail.co.uk, it will only encourage them.
*shudder*
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Insightful)
I still don't think this is a good solution or that they have thought it through, surely the same recession that has killed online advertising revenues has also severely reduced the number of people willing and/or able to pay ?
Re:NY Times can do it, can your paper do it? (Score:4, Insightful)
> The New York Times can make an effective paywall because they hold the rights to columnists that share opinions that are nationally relevant.
Of course they might not be all that relevant when people stop seeing their columns. Seriously, most online folk these days start at an agregator, whether that is a set of favored blogs or drudge, realclearpolitics, etc. Even if the people who create those key influencer sites subscribe to the NYT it is doubtful they will link to content behind a paywall if the past is any guide. Thus those who are contracted to write only for the NYT will, as they have already experienced in the past, see their influence decline. Good riddence to the lot of em as far as I'm concerned. Personally they end of the NYT will be a great day, this decision is a good step toward that happy event.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not going to kill journalism - it's just going to thin it out. Advertising revenue is perfectly viable to support news sites out there - it's just not enough to support the current number of them. Every small town has a newspaper. Most larger ones have several. Every large-ish city typically has 4-5 television stations that also have their own news departments that do journalism.
Go to Google's news aggragator. Every article they have has typically a few thousand versions of the same article at different sites. In reality, rather than thousands, we really only need a few dozen traditional news sites. I don't care how much they fight it out and die until we whittle down to an appropriate amount.
How to do this right? (Score:5, Insightful)
The three posts I'm seeing so far all assume this will be the death knell of the Times. But the alternative if nothing changes is for the Times to piss all its money away until it closes its doors in bankruptcy. There has to be a happy medium. Somebody has to try to find it, and that's what the New York Times is doing now.
mrphoton says he'll read www.bbc.co.uk instead. That's all well and good, but the BBC is supported by British taxes, while the New York Times is a private newspaper. There's a strong tradition of separation of media and government in the U.S. and it isn't likely to ever change. But some have proposed operating newspapers as nonprofit organizations, which may be a close compromise. In that arrangement, newspapers would essentially be relying on government to leave them alone, by not charging them taxes. Where their operating expenses would come from, however, remains an open question.
To me, charging subscription fees for access to content makes a lot of sense. One of my favorite publications, The Economist, has always had a pay-wall around most of its content. And while advertising rates for magazines have been dropping across the board, subscriptions to The Economist have actually been climbing in the last few years. Why? Cynics say it's because people want to look intellectual by carrying around a copy of The Economist that they actually never read. People who subscribe to The Economist say they do so because of the marked differences between it and other, more traditional newspapers: The Economist prints zero celebrity gossip, and it never fiddles around with stories about car crashes or green gardening. It has a global focus. Its stories are well-researched, thorough, and not dumbed-down. In other words, if I'm going to pay to have someone deliver a stack of printed pages to my mailbox every week, The Economist will bring me far less wasted paper.
It's also mentioning that The Economist does not print any bylines for its articles. So to Tom Friedman's complaints, cry me a river. Do I subscribe to the New York Times because I want an informative, timely, in-depth news resource, or do I subscribe because I like to read so-called rock star columnists? Personally, I don't even read Tom Friedman's column, because his books have been massive disappointments. Talk about overrated. So should a guy like Tom Friedman be allowed to hold an entire news gathering organization hostage to his own ego? Tell you what, Tom: If you're such a public treasure, start a blog. Surely the people will flock to it. Or could it be that the only reason anybody read your column at all was because of the New York Times, and not the other way around?
The success of a subscription program for the Times' Web site will probably all depend on the price they charge for it. Certainly there will have to be opportunities to get stuff for free, as Salon.com has done. Even The Economist offers a 14-day free trial. Even then, the idea that anyone will pay even a fraction of the cost of a subscription to the New York Times just to read one or two articles a week -- or one or two articles a month -- is nuts. Somebody needs to do the hard research to figure out a realistic rate of payment for the content that people actually read. A monthly or yearly subscription fee, when nothing is showing up in the mailbox and you never remember to go and look at the site, isn't going to work.
At the same time, I worry about the concept of newspapers as a public good. Everyone, no matter their income level, is entitled to know what's going on in their government and the world at large. If newspapers close themselves off only to paying subscribers, you force the economically disadvantaged to venues such as TV news. On the one hand, local TV news has been turned over almost entirely to fluff. On the other, cable outlets like Fox News look increasingly like propaganda weapons.
So what to do? I've long tho
Re:RIP, New York Times (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to pay. I read the NYTimes online everyday; a habit I started more than 10 years ago. The sites/shows you have listed are really just aggregators. Someone needs to be there, hit the pavement and get the story. This article [nytimes.com] is a great example of good reporting. I think it is worth value. If I have to pay a few cents for it... so be it.
new media (paper) models (Score:3, Insightful)
This sounds like a bunch of desperate people. What the news industry seams to have lost track of is that the Internet is a new medium, unlike the printing press, radio stations or tv stations it not a business that
Its seems silly to ignore these differences, and I doubt a successful business can be built, with out these issues being taken into account.
Perhaps some kind of low cost strategy, such as articles being written by free lancers (who would be paid on a commission/bonus only basis). There could then be a reply service which would allow another side to the story, giving the people who read the articles the two arguments to judge for them selves. Putting all of this online and allowing people to subscribe to a topic they find of interest (and delivering a individual paper) to your own home every day/week for a fee. This will give you Google like ability to profile users (address plus billing details) along with more effective targeted adverting. Its a lot more complicated than this but its a start.
Of cause this would open up another can of worms (big media is also about control of information)
The Times has its reasons for doing this... (Score:5, Insightful)
...and I don't think it's entirely out of greed. The simple truth is that you can't pay columnists, reporters and other staff unless you have sufficient revenue. If people are abandoning the print version of the paper, and advertisers don't see the return they expect from ads, you lose a lot of per-copy revenue and ad revenue.
The truth is that the old model of "sell a paper for $1.00 a day, collect $XM in ad revenue per year, and your profit is that less your employment and other costs" is going away. Now, quality media outlets are faced with a tough choice. (Yes, I know, we can debate quality, but I happen to like the Times.) They have to choose to provide their content free, while only recouping part of their costs from ad sales, or charging for content and hoping enough people like the paper enough to pay.
I see this causing two problems:
For journalism in general: When are people going to realize that actual journalism, investigative reporting, and other well-researched pieces cost money? Call me an old fogey if you want, but I think this transition we're going through is going to make it much tougher to get well-written, well-research, less-biased content. Look at how CNN has jumped in with both feet on the whole Web 2.0/Twitter/Facebook user-generated content. Some of the well-written stuff actually makes the television news, but the vast majority of it is a garbage dump compared to a legitimate news organization. Can you imagine the historical record of the Haitian earthquake filled with stuff like "OMG OMG teh quakez suX0rz dude" ? That's overblown, but you get the idea... Same thing goes for the reporting of both sides of an issue. Would you rather have a news organization making some attempt to neutrally report, or would you rather have the Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh blogs against the ACORN and ELF blogs? Investigative reporting is even more important, and I'm not talking about papparazzi stalking celebrities. Would Watergate have ever been uncovered without a news organization paying to cover it?
For employment: I've seen this kind of rationalization of every single penny of cost happening over the last few years. Outside of journalism, it happens every day...a software developer in India is 10% the cost of a US one, or we can eliminate this raft of manual processes by automating the whole thing. Some of this is good...I'm glad I'm not a file clerk at a huge insurance company, for example. But, it has to stop somewhere. There are some people who need mundane work. Manufacturing used to provide that, now it's gone. Not everyone can be a manager, or sell things, or manage projects. If you eliminate everyone's job, especially those at the low end of the skill spectrum, you're going to have a lot of unemployed consumers who can't buy your product.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
And the converse: the more sites go paywalled, the safer it is for the next to go paywalled. It's not unlike the airline industry, which has been in revenue hell forever, being essentially nothing but price competition. Now, they're starting to charge for things they didn't used to. The public is up in arms! But they're all doing it. If you don't like it, you can drive.
Are the airlines/newspapers evil for wanting to make money? Are the consumers evil for wanting something to cost as close to nothing as possible? No, in both cases.
Offering content online has to be worth the trouble. If it's not, they're just going to quit. Ooooh, readership! Frankly, I don't care about readership if I'm a newspaper, I care about revenue (and yes, one is a proxy for the other, but don't lose sight of which one you really care about--it's profit). Losing a bunch of readers who don't actually bring any revenue isn't really a problem. We will eventually settle into something that mostly works.
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'll probably sign up for this (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Free-Market Principle: Quality commands a price (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is precisely why I (and apparently many others) pay for access to wsj.com. It's something like $8-12/month. That's well worth it to get access to the in-depth content they provide. Sure, I browse other news sites to scan headlines, and I would probably even be willing to pay for one or two more high-quality sites.
What I will not pay for is a web site that does not provide me with original content, like sites that just aggregate the stuff of the wire, from the AP and Reuters.
I also pay for Slashdot by the way - of course most of the content other than "Ask Slashdot" is rebroadcast from other websites - but the original content here is the lively (and IMO worthwhile) discussions.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
I find some of the anti-journalism bias I see on this site to be a little scary. It seems like the kind of anti-intellectualism that allows our society to play right into the hands of propagandists and demagogues, and it's frankly not what I'd expect of the /. audience.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not going to kill journalism - it's just going to thin it out.
Pah. Journalism has killed journalism. Your typical "journalist" these days is a person who rewords a company's press release and sources a relevant picture.
When was the last time you read an article that included a direct quote? Or asked someone a pertinent question? Or hell, even showed any knowledge of the subject material?
For online publications you typically get more journalism from the comments section. "Hey, they said it was coming out this month in the last press release. Why the delay?" "XYZ happened."
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm playing Devil's advocate here a little, but I suppose the trouble is what happens at the latter end of the curve.
When we're down to 12 sources, what then? Supposing they need to drum up revenue to support doing the research once done by thousands of others, so as to give us accurate and factual news, they might consider charging for their content. Once they do, let's say the public decides they will go get the content for free by reading blogs or aggregators, which provide handy summaries of the news, alongside helpful (if biased) interpretations. What then?
If the dying-off trend continues, all we're left with is partisan news which gets its funding from something other than doing good research and writing quality articles. Or we're reading the blog posts of the relatively-informed, and trusting them to abide by some kind of journalistic standard.
That's not really a good thing, now, is it?
Good journalism costs money.
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
When was the last time you read an article that included a direct quote? Or asked someone a pertinent question? Or hell, even showed any knowledge of the subject material?
This morning. I suggest you read more.
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Insightful)
It's well worth a read. Paywalls are not the problem, but the dross passed off as 'news'.
Let Them Try (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the dying off is a part of the solution, not the problem...
It's just a matter of evolution, their dead brings life to many small ones, then the process starts again to grow big.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
The 1995 Presidential election season, give or take.
The problem with journalism is that it is in a death spiral:
And so on. There's probably no good fix for any of this except to let things burn out and start over from scratch.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Good luck with that. It works for the WSJ because the WSJ reports actual news; investors will not tolerate op-ed rants being passed off as news because it would make the WSJ worthless for financial analysts. The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases - such lack of objectivity is not something you are likely to succeed in selling online to people in business. People at home will just tune to CNN and FauxNews for their daily dose of op-eds rather than sit in front of a browser to pay for their spoon-fed propoganda.
Re:How to do this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
maybe the question should be "what paper has more eyeballs belonging to people with excess money"...
Not at all. The New York Times requires registration, but it's free. That's not bringing in the advertisers, apparently.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted, the blogging community are unlikely to finance a reporter who wants to infiltrate the Taliban, at least not any time soon.
On the other hand, locals could report such information, often with far more insight since they actually live there.
I hope this works for them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good Bye, New York Times (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, what about this glorious, titanic, cosmic pile of festering turds? [nymag.com]
Re:Good luck with that (Score:2, Insightful)
WSJ can be business expensed by a lot of people.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
What I want in journalists is to select the information that is relevant for me. The NYT does this rather well, as do other newspapers such as the Economist and the Guardian in the UK, Spiegel, FAZ and the Sueddeutsche in Germany, or Le Monde in France. In my opinion, this unbiased selection of information is the main job of journalists - people still can do such a selection much better than automated searches. For that reason, I couldn't care less about the opinion or comments pages, although it is usually these pages that people mainly talk about. I mean, shouldn't educated users be able to form their own opinions based on the available information? If that's the case, and I believe it is, shouldn't one read the newspaper that provides the best selection of such information available, regardless of the (unimportant) opinion section?
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
The NYT (and subsidiaries like the Boston Rag, er, Globe) pass off op-eds as news and ignore stories which don't support their biases
What can I say? Citation needed.
I find some of the anti-journalism bias I see on this site to be a little scary. It seems like the kind of anti-intellectualism that allows our society to play right into the hands of propagandists and demagogues, and it's frankly not what I'd expect of the /. audience.
And on that note, the wonderful thing about NYT opinion pieces (which are clearly labeled as such), is that they involve lucid argumentation and reasonable discussion. They're not meant to be propaganda and they would be very ineffective as such, because tend they argue an issue rather than asserting a point. Most people look for evidence to support, rather than shape, their beliefs. If you're in the rational minority, intelligent discussion is always useful.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
if they were to charge those outside of the UK then they would have to ensure that their GeoIP code works flawlessly
Not really... they just have to make sure it's reasonable. Maybe a few people will go to the effort to use some proxy server, but honestly it's really not worth that effort just to save such a small fee for such a commodity service...
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
You may be too young to remember this but papers you used to experiment with a national / local split. That's the reason for the A/B/C/D... stuff.
A was produced at headquarters. B was produced at local offices. C/D/E were produced by specialized vendors / or run weekly. That's what's happening on a national scale. Let the local papers do the B section stuff. Tell me about the mayor, but actually do a good job covering the news.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
When was the last time you read an article that included a direct quote? Or asked someone a pertinent question? Or hell, even showed any knowledge of the subject material?
What?
Every news story on the front page of the New York Times includes direct quotes. They are reported by real reporters, working in the actual locations where news is taking place -- so I'd say their knowledge of the subject matter is considerable.
Maybe the more pertinent question is, just what is it you have been reading that you've been calling "news"? You're pointing the finger at journalism, but maybe the real problem is closer to home than you think.
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed - and it's especially sickening when it's not just company press releases, but Government press releases complete with all the spin that entails. Even the BBC happily do this - only when they're aware of significant controversy will they note any opposing viewpoint.
And it's astonishing how many stories are copy and pasted around the news would, with trivial word changes to make it look original, and any misinformation in the original getting copied too.
The research often amounts to a quick Google at best. And sometimes not even that, in that you get mistakes that could be found out if they'd at least done that. Even with usually good sites like the BBC, I've had to correct them on misinformation that a trivial Google search would correct.
For online publications you typically get more journalism from the comments section.
Agreed. Similarly, blogs seem to have a bad reputation here on Slashdot, but actually I'd say that they, along with commenters, tend to do a far better job of "reporting on something in the news, and giving further information" than the news "journalists" do.
Re:How to do this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, now you're running around in circles. I ask what newspaper has more eyeballs than the New York Times. You say only people with "excess money" read it. I tell you it's free right now. You say nobody reads it because nobody wants to read it, because they don't believe it's "high quality." Here's where I remind you that the New York Times has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other news-gathering organization, and it gets more traffic than any other online newspaper (but the eyeballs still aren't paying the bills). What's your next argument? Nobody reads it because all its articles are in Chinese?
Re:Go right ahead. (Score:4, Insightful)
"If the NYT and WSJ can go and stay non-free, it will be a matter of time before the BBC and the Telegraph and the Register and CNN go non-free as well."
BBC - and the equivalents, such as SVT in Sweden, NHK in Japan, and so on - are public broadcasters. They are not allowed to charge for content, nor is it in their interest to do so (they'd not get to keep most of the money anyhow). They, and their websites, will stay open no matter what. I guess NPR in the US would be in a similar situation.
And the more papers go non-free, the larger the readership - and the advertising revenue - at the remaining free ones.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that the NYT has never given us accurate and factual news...
It is usually unwise to make unqualified statements.
You may not like the NY Times, but it certainly appears there are counter-examples to the assertion that it "has never given us accurate and factual news." For example, a trivial spot check reveals an article on the site today: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/us/17census.html?ref=us [nytimes.com] That article reports that Census Bureau data shows "the decline [in employment] was greater among black and Hispanic couples than non-Hispanic white ones." This appears to be true (see: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/families_households/014540.html [census.gov] ), and as a consequence your statement appears false.
It is likely the Times has made many mistakes over the years, but if your intent is to demonstrate the Times is a poor source of news you should probably show that it has made more and/or more significant errors than other news organizations, especially as related to the quantity of information reported. It would be interesting to see real data arguing that, as opposed to anecdotal or notional generalizations.
As it stands, it's hard to take seriously your comment's moderation as "insightful."
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Try reading an actual repuable newspaper.
Err. Last time I went to www.nytimes.com? Really, go do it now and see if any of the top articles fit your description.
If your idea of an online publication is slashdot or boingboing: fine, but that's not what most people mean by "journalism". You seem to be arguing not that "journalism has killed journalism" but that blogs have killed journalism.
Re:Free-Market Principle: Quality commands a price (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Source killed my software revenues (consulting)
Open source products actually make consulting easier for most people -- there are products the customer / consultant have actually heard of, and they can be implemented much sooner than a custom solution could be scoped, coded, tested and deployed. Now if you're doing old-school custom software what's killing you isn't necessarily open source, it's the internet. Having customers able to easily locate, choose, and download an application that meets their needs makes the idea of software customization -- in a lot of situations -- obsolete.
That said, I've been programming for a very long time. I saw the change coming and embraced it. If that's not your thing then so be it, but you should know the reasons and they are not "open source". It's not some dark voodoo, it's instant gratification, available for everyone. Blame the internet, blame competition, but many people are making money with Open Source software and I'm one of them.
If a car analogy helps you, it's like the local car dealer keeping the local prices high for years because there weren't any other choices around, and boom! CarMax moves into the next town. Local people now have choice. Why would they want to use the local car dealer? If you can't answer that, then you (as the local car dealer) will be forced into another career choice. You must provide added value that the customer will not only understand, but will pay for. CarMax isn't the problem, it's that you are still running on an antiquated business model that provides no value proposition for the consumer. CarMax just provided the catalyst for your customers to understand they are no longer without options. Blaming CarMax only shows you don't understand the problem.
MOD UP (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Every small town has a newspaper. Most larger ones have several.... In reality, rather than thousands, we really only need a few dozen traditional news sites. I don't care how much they fight it out and die until we whittle down to an appropriate amount.
I wish my small town had one. We used to. Now we don't even rate a paragraph in the nearby big city's paper/news site - unless there's a big, ugly crime or really salacious scandal.
Except for bad news, there's almost no local news. (Yes, there's still the events calendar, but listings in that are paid for.)
We are getting too little news from far too few sources. Sadly, too few peope seem to care.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
Or fake/altered photos/videos - if you're Fox News...
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
I think I vomited in my mouth a little.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
Every large-ish city typically has 4-5 television stations that also have their own news departments that do journalism.
Oh, please. TV news is the opposite of journalism.
Every small town has a newspaper.
So what? The problem isn't the quantity of newspapers, it's the quality.
I live in San Jose, CA, which used to have a first rate paper. Lots of good content, a long history of award-winning winning investigative journalism, and serious coverage of the computer business. It was even profitable. Craigslist destroyed their classifieds business, which used to be their biggest profit center, but they were still doing pretty well.
Then some "activist investors" decided it wasn't profitable enough. They forced the chain that owned it to sell out completely, and this paper ended up with a chain whose main talent seems to be cost-cutting. Now the page count is down (like 2/3) the quality of the writing is down, they no longer have access to their former chain's news bureaus, and circulation is down.
Profits? What profits? For that you need subscribers. I used to subscribe and read it every day — now I rarely even bother to read it online.
Really, the decline in advertising revenue is only part of the problem, as this sad story illustrates. There's also the fact that most newspapers (including all those small town papers) belong to mammoth media companies that are run by bean counters.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Still, there's such a thing as letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I don't advocate giving anybody a free pass, but why are a few missteps reason enough to give everybody an automatic fail, no matter how high a standard they set?
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, the New York Times has moved to the left in the past 30 years while the American mainstream has remained, largely center right.
You've got to be kidding! The NYT almost single-handedly convinced the much of the American public to support the Iraq War effort through front page scare stories by Judith Miller, while Scott Ritter and others casting doubt on the need for war were marginalized. In many ways the NYT speaks for powerful interests among the East Coast elite and Wall Street. Their "star" business writer, Joe Nocera, should be paid by hedge funds if he isn't already, as for years he ridiculed those (like Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne) who warned about Wall Street malfeasance. Political conservatives (but not the religious right ones) should love the NYT.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Conservatives expressing their displeasure with NYT and WaPo are akin to Br'er Rabbit expressing his displeasure at being thrown into the briar patch.
Hey mods (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't Flamebait. We're talking about why media is failing these days, and this is absolutely relevant.
Currently Fox news is #1 and this is what they're serving up for the public. It's unethical, misleading, and just plain flat-out wrong. And currently (if the numbers mean anything) this is what the public actually wants.
This should scare the absolute crap out of you.
Re:Oh well (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post would be more interesting if you could define 'liberal' and 'centre right'. The NY Times is not left-wing. The Guardian is left-wing. Unless you're using the American definition of 'left' which is basically anyone who objects to bringing back the workhouses. How can a newspaper with such deference to Wall Street and capitalism be left-wing?
In any given election, 99% of Americans vote for candidates who support large government spending on social projects, so I'm not sure how right-wing the population really is. Bear in mind the teabaggers are a very small group of Fox News astroturfers who had no problems with big government when a white president was giving blank cheques to the military.
Re:Oh well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is a very good description of 9/10ths of the articles you already find in the blogging world; which is why I don't think that web 2.0 is going to be a particularly adequate replacement for traditional journalism.
Re:Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, relevant direct quotes in context, and not just from people with the same ideological background.
For fuck's sake, man. When an earthquake has just dropped a few floors' worth of concrete on half your family, what is the preferred "ideological background" you're allowed to have before you can quote "in context"? Are you even listening to yourself?
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
Any sources other than left-wing Huff post or media matters?
Honestly, no. There are decreasingly fewer and fewer non-blog, non-editorial sources for anything. That's what this whole discussion has been about. Legit and credible news sources barely cover the actual news, let alone fact-check one another. Fact-checking seems to be a vital service that is done exclusively by bloggers with an opposite ideological slant or by Jon Stewart.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
Re:Oh well (Score:3, Insightful)